Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

If you were at home today tuning into question time, you would understand from this Treasurer that there's nothing to see in relation to problems that families and the economy are facing at the moment. You would have heard from this Treasurer, today, that he was prepared to take the responsibility for decisions that he says have been taken that have been beneficial to the Australian people, but he produced no evidence of that.

What we saw from the government today was significant hubris, a government which is telling the Australian people 'there's nothing to see here'. These are families that have faced, over the last two years, 12 interest rate increases. People are paying a thousand dollars more for their electricity bills. Their insurance premiums have gone through the roof. People are paying more and more and more when they go to the supermarket, when they go to the butcher's and when they go to the fruit shop. And this Treasurer and this Prime Minister today tried to tell the Australian people: 'There's nothing to see here; the job's done. Be grateful. Be grateful for what this government has done for you. Be grateful that over the last two years in real terms your wages have gone backwards. Be grateful for the fact that you're paying more for your mortgage.' The Treasurer gets up and says, 'It's okay, because we've passed on savings to families and we've somehow made the situation much better.' They haven't. This government couldn't be more out of touch.

There are families at the moment who are taking their kids out of schools because they can't afford to pay the fees. There are families across the country and there are pensioners across the country who could not afford to heat and eat—they can do one or the other, but they can't do both—over winter. We know that there are families who are in distress and have gone onto payment plans with energy companies, and this Prime Minister and this Treasurer make no mention of that whatsoever. There are people who are in discussions with their bank right now to work out how it is they're not going to be sold up by the bank because they're missing their mortgage repayments. The Reserve Bank governor has pleaded with this government to stop spending as much money in the economy as they do. What the Australian government—the Albanese government—wants people to believe is that getting $10 from this government somehow is going to compensate you for paying $100 more each week to the bank in increased mortgage rates. The interest rates in Canada and in New Zealand have already come down, and you would have expected that interest rates would already have come down in this comparable economy as well. But they're not going to, because the Reserve Bank governor has warned the Prime Minister and the Treasurer that the path this government has put us on is not sustainable.

Let's be clear about it. The first responsibility of the government is to keep Australians safe. This Prime Minister has failed that first test. The next test is to make sure that you do no harm and you take care of Australians and help them through their lives. This government is making it harder and harder and harder for Australians, particularly those on fixed incomes—pensioners and self-funded retirees and people who are on part pensions. Small-business owners across the country are feeling the pain as well. When you look at your electricity bill tonight at home and ask yourself, 'How on earth are we going to pay this bill?' or when you look at your insurance premium and say, 'How on earth are we going to pay this bill?' it's small-business owners who are saying the same thing.

People who have got small stores that hold their goods in cold storage—their electricity bills have gone through the roof. In some cases—as we've moved around the country, there have been endless examples of this—those bills haven't just gone up by $1,000; those bills have gone up by tens of thousands of dollars in some businesses. Can those small businesses, because their overdrafts now have gone up to double digits under this government, afford to absorb that cost? No, they can't. They can't, because they're paying more and more for every input cost. This is why, when you go to the supermarket, when you go to the butcher or when you go to the fruit shop or wherever it might be, people are paying more and more for groceries. We know that inflation is running at 3½ per cent, it's persistent and it remains well above the two to three per cent target range. We know that, on comparative inflation, Australia's core inflation is 3.8 per cent higher than in the Netherlands, higher than in the United Kingdom, higher than in the United States, Germany, Spain, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Italy, Canada, France and the entire Euro area. And yet this Prime Minister and this Treasurer in question time today say to you that there's nothing to see here, that you've never had it better, that since the Albanese government has been in power over the last two years it has never been better. Well, I've got a wake-up call to this Prime Minister and to this Treasurer: get out of this parliament, and go and speak to average Australians in the suburbs. Go and speak to people who are having their houses sold up. Go and speak to people who are in the manufacturing industry.

Under this government over the last two years, there's been a threefold increase in the number of manufacturing businesses that have closed their doors. Now, Australians aren't consuming less. Those businesses have gone to Malaysia. They have gone to Wyoming and elsewhere around the world, where it's cheaper to produce because there's a government there delivering an energy policy—for example, in Ontario, with the use of 70 per cent nuclear power in the system, they're paying one-third the electricity cost that we are in our country. We're importing those end products, those finished products, back into Australia at a higher cost with more emissions, and Australians have lost the jobs and economic productivity. And yet the Treasurer says, 'Nothing to see; you've never had it better.'

We know that the government's renewables-only energy policy is contributing to inflation. We know this because people see it in their power bills. The independent Energy Regulator is saying to the Australian public—this is not someone employed by the Liberals or by the National Party; this is somebody who is an independent statutory officeholder, telling the Australian people that we're going to have blackouts in this country. We're going to have brownouts. There will be rationing of power. There will be continued growth in the cost of electricity, and Australian families can't afford three more years of this government. That much is obvious. Australians are barely holding it together at the moment in terms of their own budgets, and all this this Prime Minister and this Treasurer can offer is more of the same.

And it's not just in relation to economics and not just in relation to security. This government goes from one issue to the next where they frankly don't have a clue how to manage issues or how to resolve problems. They have a situation at the moment where they are absolutely obsessed with the Greens party's policies, philosophies and approaches. It means that every decision they're taking is based on how they can win votes or hold votes from the Greens in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney. What is happening here is that those people are being treated more fairly, it seems—or they are certainly being prioritised—than people in regional areas and people in outer metropolitan areas. We've seen it in relation to the agricultural sector. Farmers have marched on this parliament for the first time in 40 years during the course of this week. We've seen it in relation to the mining sector. The mining sector is here in town this week, and they are belling the cat here. They are absolutely clear about the fact that this Prime Minister and the Minister for the Environment and Water have taken decisions which have detrimentally impacted the mining sector. Without that money from the mining sector, we don't have schools been refurbished in this country. We don't have new roads being opened in capital cities. Without the WA economy doing well, the whole Australian economy is suffering.

When we say to the Australian public, by way of this very important debate today, that the collapse in living standards under this government is real, it is real. Australians are feeling it, and that's why they're losing faith in this Prime Minister. That's why this Prime Minister's numbers in every poll that you look at at the moment are through the floor. Australians aren't stupid. They're not going to accept the hollow assurances from this government, and this Prime Minister and Treasurer should stand condemned.

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